But their sovereign independence was virtually recognized by the world.

Great nations had entered into public and diplomatic relations and conventions with them, and their agents at foreign courts were now dignified with the rank and title of ambassadors.
The Spanish king had likewise refused to them the concession of the right of navigation and commerce in the East Indies, but it was a matter of notoriety that the absence of the word India, suppressed as it was in the treaty, implied an immense triumph on the part of the States, and that their flourishing and daily increasing commerce in the farthest East and the imperial establishments already rising there were cause of envy and jealousy not to Spain alone, but to friendly powers.
Yet the government of Great Britain affected to regard them as something less than a sovereign state.

Although Elizabeth had refused the sovereignty once proffered to her, although James had united with Henry IV.

in guaranteeing the treaty just concluded between the States and Spain, that monarch had the wonderful conception that the Republic was in some sort a province of his own, because he still held the cautionary towns in pledge for the loans granted by his predecessor.

His agents at Constantinople were instructed to represent the new state as unworthy to accredit its envoys as those of an independent power.